crew might argue that, especially that yelping Throatslitter, but they were lounging round on a damned island right now, weren't they? Not out here doing what marines were supposed to do, infiltrating, kicking the white squirmy balls outa Edur and Letherii and blowing up the occasional company just to remind Hood who did all the delivering.
She liked this life, yes she did. Better than that squalid existence she'd climbed out of back home. Poor village girl cowering in the ghostly shadow of a dead sister. Wondering when the next vanishing of the shoals would spell her watery demise. Oh, but the boys had wanted her once she'd been the only one left, wanted to fill that shadow with their own, as if that was even possible.
But Koryk here, well, that was different. Felt different, anyway. Because she was older now, she supposed. More experienced, so much so that she now knew what stirred her little winged flutter-bird. Watching Koryk kill people, ah, that had been so sweet, and lucky everyone else was too busy to have heard her moan and nearly squeal and guess what it'd meant.
Revelations were the world's sharpest spice, and she'd just had a noseful. Making the night somehow clearer, cleaner. Every detail blade-edged, eager to be seen, noted by her glittering eyes. She heard the small creatures moving through the scrub of the fallow field, heard the frogs race up the boles of nearby trees. Mosquito hum and—
A sudden blinding flash to the south, a bloom of fiery light lifting skyward above a distant treeline. A moment later the rumble of twin detonations reached them. Everyone motionless now, crouched down. The small creatures frozen, quivering, terrified.
'Bad time for an ambush,' Koryk muttered as he worked his way back, slipping past Tarr.
'So not one sprung by Malazan marines,' Fiddler said, moving up to meet Koryk and Tarr. 'That was a league away, maybe less. Anyone recall which squads were to our right first night?'
Silence.
'Should we head over, Sergeant?' Tarr asked. He had drawn his shortsword. 'Could be they need our help.'
Gesler arrived. 'Stormy says he heard sharpers after the cussers,' the sergeant said. 'Four or five.'
'Could be the ambush got turned,' Smiles said, struggling to control her breathing. Oh, take us there, you damned sergeant. Let me see Koryk fight again. It's this itch, you see . . .
'Not in our orders,' Fiddler said. 'If they've been mauled, the survivors will swing north or south and come looking for friends. We keep going.'
'They come up to find us and they might have a thousand enemy on their heels,' Gesler said.
'Always a possibility,' Fiddler conceded. 'All right, Koryk, back on point. We go on, but with extra stealth. We're not the only ones to see and hear that, so we might run into a troop riding hard across our path. Set us a cautious pace, soldier.'
Nodding, Koryk set out along the trail.
Smiles licked her lips, glowered at Tarr. 'Put the damned pig-sticker away, Tarr.'
'That's "Corporal" to you, Smiles.'
She rolled her eyes. 'Hood's breath, it's gone to his head.'
'And those aren't knives in your hands?'
Smiles sheathed them, said nothing.
'Go on,' Fiddler ordered them. 'Koryk's waiting.'
Corabb picked up his end of the stretcher again and set out after the others. Bottle had slept through that distant succession of explosions. Sign of just how exhausted the poor man was. Still, it was unnerving not having him awake and keeping an eye on things, the way he could leap from animal to animal. Birds, too. And even insects. Although Corabb wondered just how far an insect could see.
He reached up and crushed a mosquito against one eyelid. The stretcher pitched behind him and he heard Cuttle swear under his breath. Corabb quickly regained his hold on the sapling. Damned insects, he needed to stop thinking about them. Because thinking about them led to hearing and feeling them, crawling and biting everywhere and him with both hands used up. This wasn't like the desert. You could see chigger fleas coming on the wind, could hear a bloodfly from five paces, could pretty much guess that under every rock or stone there was a scorpion or a big hairy spider or a snake all of which wanted to kill you. Simple and straightforward, in other words. None of this devious whispering in the night, this whining at the ear, this winged flit up a man's nostril. Or crawling into the hair to take nips of flesh that left a swollen, oozing, damnably itching hole.
And